More Eric Clapton

• This original import pressing boasts solid Double Plus (A++) grades from top to bottom – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
• Both of these sides are big and rich, with remarkable clarity and three-dimensional space, the kind of sound that most other pressings only hint at
• Forget that critical listening stuff and just notice that these Hot Stamper copies are simply more relaxed, musical and involving than anything you’ve heard – guaranteed or your money back
• Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – those on “Blues Before Sunrise” are especially bad – but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind
• 4 1/2 stars: “For years, fans craved an all-blues album from Eric Clapton; he waited until 1994 to deliver From the Cradle. The album manages to re-create the ambience of postwar electric blues, right down to the bottomless thump of the rhythm section. [H]is solos are white-hot and evocative, original and captivating. …one of Clapton’s finest moments.” 

This vintage Duck/Reprise pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of From the Cradle Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1994
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Shootout Criteria

What are sonic qualities by which a record — any record — should be judged? Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, vocal presence, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, spaciousness, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, three-dimensionality, and on and on down the list.

When we can get a number of these qualities to come together on the side we’re playing, we provisionally give it a ballpark Hot Stamper grade, a grade that is often revised during the shootout as we hear what the other copies are doing, both good and bad.

Once we’ve been through all the side ones, we play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side. Other copies from earlier in the shootout will frequently have their grades raised or lowered based on how they sounded compared to the eventual shootout winner. If we’re not sure about any pressing, perhaps because we played it early on in the shootout before we had learned what to listen for, we take the time to play it again.

Repeat the process for side two and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides of each pressing match up.

It may not be rocket science, but it’s a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.

The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing — or your money back.

What We’re Listening For On From the Cradle

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Side One

Blues Before Sunrise
Third Degree
Reconsider Baby
Hoochie Coochie Man
Five Long Years
I’m Tore Down
How Long Blues
Goin’ Away Baby

Side Two

Blues Leave Me Alone
Sinner’s Prayer
Motherless Child
It Hurts Me Too
Someday After A While
Standin’ Round Crying
Driftin’
Groaning The Blues

About the Album

From the Cradle is the twelfth solo studio album by Eric Clapton, released on 12 September 1994 by Warner Bros. Records. A blues cover album and Clapton’s follow-up to his successful 1992 live album, Unplugged, it is his only UK number-one album to date.

Although he had long been associated with the blues, From the Cradle was Clapton’s first attempt at an all-blues album. He would subsequently record Riding with the King with B. B. King; a tribute to Robert Johnson, Me and Mr. Johnson; and a collaboration with J. J. Cale, The Road to Escondido.

The title comes from the last line of a four-line poem written by Clapton (and which he never set to music) and printed in his own handwriting on the second page of the CD booklet: “All along this path I tread / My heart betrays my weary head / with nothing but my love to save / from the cradle to the grave.”

According to the liner notes, the album was almost entirely recorded live in the studio with no overdubs or edits, the only overdubs being featured on “How Long Blues” (dobro) and “Motherless Child” (drums).

The album won Clapton the 1995 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album and he received a further nomination for Album of the Year.

In July 2014, Guitar World placed From the Cradle on their list “Superunknown: 50 Iconic Albums That Defined 1994.”

-Wikipedia